Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau asks why we shouldn't just cancel all the damn mortgages and start over. I sense that he isn't the only one thinking this sort of thing these days, and while the temptation is to snort and say "that's ridiculous!", the fact is that something similar has been tried before, in land reform schemes that aimed to address an untenable inequality between landholders and the much more numerous unlanded poor.

More than a few people in our society feel that the banks represent this sort of unstable power, so it's not surprising that somewhat radical programs are becoming more commonly voiced. I'd like to consider this proposal on those terms, and see whether it doesn't have some merit.

So what are the advantages of what you might call a "reboot"? Simplicity is perhaps the greatest; the person who now has title, keeps it, free of liens. If you are in favor of redistributing wealth, this certainly does so, away from the holders of capital and towards small landholders.

Meanwhile, you're doing a lot to clean up overburdened hosuehold balance sheets. People being dragged under by a huge mortgage suddenly get a lot of breathing room. Households gain assets in the place of net liabilities (their underwater mortgage). Those assets might be leveraged for creative activity; at the very least, being freed from the fear of homelessness might enable people to take entrepreneurial risks that they otherwise wouldn't.

Obviously, a not-inconsiderable feature for many people is that this would strenuously punish bankers who are perceived to have so far gotten off scot free--and to be taking unusual liberties in the belief that they are too damn important to suffer along with the rest of us.

Sounds great! Why not do it?

Well, as with so many things, there are a few downsides. Start with the fact that the outstanding value of mortgage-backed securities on one-to-four family homes is about $11 trillion, That's about 80% of GDP, give-or-take. Now, not all of that debt is held by Americans, but essentially you're talking about wiping out value equivalent to about 70% of GDP.

Now, imagine that you suddenly lost wealth equal to 70% of your income. What would you do? You'd hunker down and refuse to spend any money, that's what. So the boost from freeing folks from their mortgages would be counteracted by the contraction from people who lost money: in their pension funds, 401(k)s and so forth. In a very simple economic model, the contraction would be equal to the boost. In the more complicated world we actually live in, the contraction would probably be bigger than the boost, for two reasons. First, psychologically, we're loss averse: humans react more strongly to losses than to gains. And second, the pain would be concentrated on a very important sector, one where contraction tends to be felt strongly throughout the economy. Yes, I'm talking about those institutions you all love to hate: the banks.

Of course, you may feel that this is a feature rather than a bug. To see why I disagree, read Benjamin Roth's The Great Depression: A Diary. When money and credit disappear, prosperity goes along with them. Wiping out trillions worth of bank equity would almost certainly mean either another, bigger taxpayer bailout, or the kind of economic misery that only besets modern economies during financial crises, or wars.

Perhaps you think this is just the sort of drivel that would be spouted by a sellout to the banksters. Whether you agree with me or not, virtually all of our economic policy folks do, so it's hard to see how we'd avoid the bailout. That means that this would be not so much a transfer from banksters to homeowners, as from taxpayers to homeowners, with all the fairness complaints this would entail. Old people who have mostly paid off their homes would get no benefit, and indeed would take a huge hit on many of their investments. The more conservative your mortgage, and the longer you've stayed in your home, the less you'd benefit; the greatest advantages would go to those with the most recent, and irresponsible, mortgages.

(Surely we can all agree that some mortgages were irresponsible--and those people would get the biggest advantage from a foreclosure moratorium).

Worse, one presumes that between torpedoing bank balance sheets, and the unilateral cancellation of mortgage contracts, most investors would reconsider the wisdom of lending money on homes. So now everyone's got a new asset--that has suddenly lost about 90% of its value, since the price of housing is today largely predicated on the ability to borrow. Cue another round of contraction, as people feel poorer and stop spending. Cue disaster from anyone who depended on selling their home to fund, at least in part, their retirement. In fact, many of the things that Americans have used home equity for--college tuition, home repairs, getting some breathing room on the credit cards--would be badly hurt. The ripple effects would be felt in many sectors.

In general, radical change just isn't good for economies. When the future isn't predictible, people don't invest--and I don't just mean rich people clipping coupons on their munis. What you see a lot in developing countries is that people don't want to make investments that should make them better off--investments in education, in agricultural equipment, in a new business. The reason they don't is that they can't predict whether the government (or roving bands of thugs) will let them benefit from their investment. If you aren't sure what the rules will be tomorrow, you're better off consuming as much as possible today, and saving only by hoarding currency in some hidey-hole. The result is a cycle of underdevelopment.

That's not to say that we shouldn't punish bankers, or reform the mortgage system, or what have you. But there are less drastic ways to sanction the bankers, clear up the titling problem, and even help struggling homeowners. With such an endless litany of arrogance, incompetence, and even criminality coming out of the mortgage sector, radical simplicity has an undeniably compelling emotional appeal. But the aftershocks would be distinctly unappealing.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.